


i survived

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail gets away, Abigail survives, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, Gen, among other things, and the paths they walk, death shrouded girls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1675796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She would use all of her. Every scrap. Every scar. Abigail got a tattoo over the remains of her ear, a feathery sunburst that spread up into her hair and dripped down to coil along her spine.</p><p>The tattoo artist brushed soft fingers over the scar tissue and said, "This will hurt, love. Scars are more sensitive than undamaged skin."</p><p>"Yes," said Abigail. "I know."</p><p>--</p><p>AU from S1 finale onward; Abigail lives. Abigail escapes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i survived

"The Salem Witch Trials," said Abigail. "Did you know the first accused was named Abigail Hobbs?"

"I didn't," Alana said. Alana wanted to believe her, so for her Abigail offered up her best imitation of a broken bird searching for the light. Abigail became a different girl for each of them.

Will wanted there to be some innocence left. Abigail wasn't sure if it was because he needed to feel like a knight killing a dragon instead of a man shooting a gun, or if he was seeing himself in her. Maybe he knew about the blood on her hands, somewhere inside, and he was trying to convince himself that if she was an innocent then maybe he could be, too. 

Freddie Lounds was difficult, because Freddie above all else wanted a story and Abigail was so desperate not to be one. Abigail wanted to be plain, to hide behind her floral neck scarves, to stand out among her peers in the mental health facility because she was so very put together, well-balanced, untouched.

Freddie was difficult because Freddie was not here to feel good about herself. It made her harder to lie to. 

Jack wanted to close his case. He wanted justice with an impersonal hand that terrified Abigail. She could not help him there. Abigail opened her eyes at him, wide, and tried to hide in Alana's shadow, to steal some of her legitimacy. She tried to look like a victim. 

Oh. Right.

She was a victim.

 

In their interviews, Abigail met Freddie's eyes and tried not to widen them, for fear Freddie would be able to look past them and see something worth writing about.

Abigail tried to only hand her innocent snippets, but it was hard, sitting there with panic in her veins and the remains of last night's gasping sobs lurking in her lungs. Freddie wanted Abigail to be exactly what she was—an accessory of serial killers and a murderer herself. Freddie wanted her to be guilty and she was.

Abigail gave people what they wanted. It kept her breathing. But she could not give Freddie her story. She tried to spin her a different one, about a damaged girl but an innocent one, but she could feel Freddie digging deeper and deeper.

In her way, Freddie was as dangerous as Hannibal.

"Did you know my name means  _father's joy_?" Abigail asked once. Freddie had smiled. 

Abigail had thought about asking to be called Abby, now, or Gail, or anything else. 

But this was her name. She was her father’s joy, Will Graham's solitary, untainted success, Hannibal's latest project. She had to be. 

 

Abigail sat on her bed in the clinic and thought  _this is selfish_. She thought  _what is my life, compared to all of theirs?_

Abigail Hobbs sat on her bed and thought,  _this is selfish. I am selfish._

Abigail sat on her bed and thought.

_This is selfish._

 

Even dead, her father dragged her down and Hannibal darkened the waters. Will wanted a daughter, an innocent, a lifeline and he was winding her up in it.

Alana hemmed her in with pastel scarves. Alana wanted Abigail to be saveable. She wanted everything to be saveable. Alana wanted Abigail to be shattered, neatly, so that they could put her back to together again.

Abigail could not afford to be shattered, so she wasn't (she was, she was, she was gasping into her pillow at 3:23 on a Tuesday morning after a dream about a doe, she was shattering). She could not afford to be shattered.

Alana Bloom wanted to save people. It was why she could not fall for Will Graham. He was not saveable and Alana knew she would try. 

Abigail wished she was saveable, but she never had been. Alana had been too late a long time ago. Her father had given her her first knife at eleven.

That same childhood summer, Abigail's mother had helped her and Marissa bake cakes in the kitchen Abigail's father would die in. She had helped them with homework and taught them to sing. Her mother's spine had held secrets and markers for her father's bad days. It was a good barometer, her mother's rigid spine.

(Some nights Abigail cried over her mother, but some nights she cried because she had no barometer now to warn her about bad days).

"Daddy's not feeling well today," her mother would say when her father did not come back from work. He'd come home days later, dirt on his boots, leaves in his hair, sun-browned after long afternoons in the open woods.

Abigail hadn’t known then that other people's fathers didn't disappear without notice. They didn't vanish into the woods and make their wives' backs stiffen when they came home. Other daughters didn't have to learn their own sharp edges in order to avoid being cut on their father's.

She had thought all people had beasts living in their bellies, needing to be fed now and then. She had thought there was something wrong with her because she didn't have one. The only things Abigail could find in her chest cavity were the soft squish of her organs.

Her father started taking her out to the woods when he decided she was old enough to handle a gun, and her mother let him. Her mother watched them go.

The gun made Abigail feel powerful. She did not like it.

Abigail ran her hand over the soft pelt of her doe, her first kill (that was a lie), and thought  _if we don't use all of you it is murder_. She felt her father push her hair back and she let him.

 

Alana Bloom wanted save her. It was easy for Abigail to forgive Alana for not being able to. She had had a lifetime of practice forgiving her mother. 

 

There was so much of Alana in Alana that she could spill into other people. Alana was Will's stability, giving him warmth without ever chilling her core.

Abigail gave her snippets in their sessions, saw Alana spill solidity, offer up strength and compassion. Alana wasn't giving anything away, not anything she couldn't afford to lose. It seemed healthy, Abigail thought. It seemed like if Alana needed to she could retreat entirely, not easily but well. 

Freddie Lounds looked at Abigail and saw a bright young girl who hadn't yet figured out that bright young girls grew up to be women who knew all their old tricks. Abigail looked at Alana and saw a steady, giving woman who had not yet learned how very well she could go cold.

Alana had not yet been pushed into a corner and forced to retreat into herself. Alana had not yet seen the icy door slam shut in her own eyes, but Abigail, sitting in the center of Alana's clinical warmth, saw that when she did Alana would be very very good at it.

 

Abigail read the books, years later, the articles and the essays about the Hannibal fiasco, and thought  _you did learn, in the end, you did. I am so sorry._

At seventeen, her scars still healing, Abigail did not yet know how to be sorry for other people. Alana did not know how cold her own heart could go. They would both learn.

 

In an attic full of antlers, Will Graham realized her sins. Abigail had been the bait, the bright lure, coiled with a facade of a pretty young girl. Will spluttered and choked, drowning. Abigail's innocence had been his lifeline and his one good thing. Now she was a killing tool dirtied by her father's hands and Will was drowning without her.

She fled the scene of the crime. 

Abigail gasped and shivered as she made her way to bigger roads. She straightened her scarf and she straightened her spine and she straightened her lungs, and then she smiled with a shake that was (a lie) shy instead of (more truthful) terrified. A nice woman in a SUV picked her up and drove her to what Abigail called home.

 _A monster retreating into her den_ , she thought as she walked up the cracked concrete driveway, as she stepped over the faded stain on the front porch that had been her mother.  _The bait put back in her fishing supply box_. She stood on the linoleum floor her father had died on.

There was a footstep behind her. 

Abigail had woken up, some nights, gasping about Nicholas Boyle.  _I did not use every part of him_ , Abigail had thought, horrified, in those dark hours. The specter of Nick Boyle had been somewhere in the room with her, she was sure.  _We only buried him. That makes it murder, not killing. There was no use to his death._

 _There was a use to him_ , she thought now, staring at Hannibal's shining shoes on her family's stained linoleum.  _It was just no use of mine._

"I have killed more people than your father ever did," Hannibal told her solemnly. In his mouth, it felt nothing like a confession. 

As Hannibal wrapped warm arms around her, stroked her hair like a soft doe’s pelt, Abigail thought about the kind of man who would call the house of a serial murderer and warn him. Hannibal had done it just to see what her father might do when Hannibal’s favorite new plaything walked through the door with a gun and a badge.

He didn’t mind his toys getting hurt, so long as they gave him a show. And right now, Will’s downfall was more entertaining than her life.

Abigail swallowed hard, and then she chuckled into Hannibal’s expensive shirt.

Hannibal Lecter liked mysteries. He liked interesting people. He liked to be surprised, because he pretended he never was.

In the brief moment of his surprise, Abigail pulled herself out of his hold. She didn’t step out of his reach, though. That would show she was scared; and even out of his reach she would never make it to the door before he did. She mustered up every ounce of scorn there was in her.

“The father kills his daughter, and then consumes her?” she says. “ _Really_ , Dr. Lecter? How mundane. Someone’s already tried to sing that song. On this same stretch of ground even.”

“I am not the father who will consume you, Abigail.”

She thought about cutting him off mid-sentence, but she didn’t. It would be rude. It would ruin his smirking-predator performance. She saved her move until he felt he’d crafted enough dramatics with clever pauses on his end. 

“Will Graham is,” she said, almost careless. He needed to want to impress her. Abigail looked back at him with eyes that were as clever and understated and cat-with-a-mouse as his could ever be. She smiled.

_You don’t find me interesting, Dr. Lecter? You will._

He did.

Abigail was her father’s daughter and her mother’s last sight; the twin of six dead girls who had been just about to start their lives. She would be Hannibal’s shadow if that was what it took to keep her breathing.

Abigail cut off her ear herself. She was used to flinging bits of herself at other people so that she could escape.

They drew some blood first, so much of it Abigail was woozy for days. She painted her own blood spatter on the ground where Will Graham had shot her father dead. Hannibal put a hand on the back of her neck and she let him. Her mother had picked out this linoleum and complained about the color for years.

“All these crime scene shows,” Hannibal said. “Our obsession with death. But you watch the detectives scurry and it seems like they can conjure a conviction out of a single broken blade of grass. No, Abigail, we do not need to be perfect in our deceit. All we have to be is believable.”

Abigail looked at him and opened her eyes wide, like she was learning something.

 

Hannibal had been torn between shaping and consuming her. 

So had they all been, in their ways. 

They had wanted her served up nicely, a victim, a lost child, a found child, a princess rescued from the dragon, a blessing amidst the horrors. 

She would walk to the butcher's block with them, holding their hands. She held their hands with the small ones she had scrubbed clean for days and then she slipped out the far side of the butchery.

Hannibal let her out of his sight once, in that little bloodstained house, and she was gone. 

So was his wallet.

 

Five stops from her father’s house, Abigail locked herself in a bus station restroom and let the panic take. She squeezed her hands over her mouth and muffled her deep, uneven gasps and cried so hard every bit of her shook.

Once, when Abigail had snuck into Hannibal's office for a heart to heart, he had been out. She’d gone through his desk. She’d found off-kilter sketches of clock faces. She’d found his address book.

When she was three bus stops from her father's house and the death spatter on its floor ( _her_ death), Abigail found a pay phone. She dialed in a number she'd already memorized. It was the only person who would not recognize Abigail's voice and who was close enough to Hannibal to have perhaps glimpsed his slips of darkness.

"Hello?" said Bedelia du Maurier.

"Hannibal Lecter is not who you think he is," Abigail said. "He's a killer. Be careful," she said and she hung up.

She got on the next bus north.

Abigail ended up in Canada. It wasn't a hard border to cross, not for a hunter's daughter. Her father had trained her well in survival.

In school they had learned about the Vietnam War, about protesters, about draftable young men sneaking over the northern border. Abigail, too, was fleeing a war she'd never asked for.

She read the news, sometimes, stopped to use the free internet in warm public libraries. She read about Will's arrest, about Beverly Katz, about the Chesapeake Ripper. She felt guilty, but Abigail always felt guilty. She breathed it, some mornings, in the cigarette smell outside the bus stops.

She washed her hands three times in the library bathroom and kept going.

She got rides from truck drivers. Abigail kept her hand on the hunting knife in her pack, but for the most part they just told stories or asked for hers. They went down long empty roads with the terrifying bulk of their cargo trundling complacently behind them. Some didn't talk at all, just turned up the music loud and dropped her at whatever hometown she was claiming that week.

She became their daughters, for that truck ride. Abigail became their little sisters and maiden aunts who had passed too young. She became their younger, braver selves, the bright-eyed versions they wished they could be, setting out to see the world.

Abigail washed dishes in truck stop diners and slept when she could. A waitress spontaneously eloped in a little town outside Vancouver when Abigail was passing through so she spent a month waiting tables and smiling at patrons. She stole some wallets. She cleaned some windshields and scrubbed floors and windows. 

The first big purchase Abigail made was a sub-zero sleeping bag that shrunk down small. It was pricey, but she thanked the handful of suited businessmen who would have found their wallets missing the day before. She slept in trees, in hollows, in the passenger seats of trucks and the break rooms of little restaurants in podunk towns where the supervisor valued kindness over rule-following.

Her father had given her her first knife at eleven. She would tell people that, when ruddy hunters complimented her ability to clean game, this dainty young woman standing in the backwoods with her neatly-tucked wool scarf and her beanie pulled down over the place where her ear should be.

She would be lying.

Abigail's first knife had been her eyes and they would always be her sharpest. She won her first sharp edge the first day she found she was scared of her father. (She could not ever remember being not afraid of her father). They were sharp, her eyes, and they had to be, to watch for safe paths, for her father's bad days, for how many teaspoons of fear were in her mother's spine each morning.

 

"I am wounded," said Alana to Will in a cold interrogation room, but she didn't know about wounds then, not really. She was going cold already. Alana was hurt but hardly bleeding out. She was mourning.

Abigail was slain, over and over again, bleeding out on the linoleum floor, crying in a gas station bathroom.

Abigail sat on a bus stop bench and thought  _I am selfish. I am selfish. I am selfish._

She read about Will’s arrest in a library in Maine and the back of her mind tried to tell her stories about Eve being force-fed the apple.

Falling asleep in her sub-zero sleeping bag, her hands tucked under her chin, she thought,  _Alana wanted to save someone who never was_.

 

Later, when people told stories about Hannibal and the chaos that pooled at his feet, when they wrote biographies of Jack and glowing eulogies for Beverley, doubtful and contradicting psychological profiles of Will Graham, when they destroyed and praised Alana Bloom in equal measure, they would talk about Abigail. Even the ones who wrote her as the virtuous virgin sacrifice of the affair— even they would side-eye her.  _She did not mourn_ , they would write.

Abigail would read the books, every one, in the little apartment she would rent one day, with its locked windows and its cheap throw rug (and the one after that, with the wonderful natural light; and the one she shared with a nice young man named Tim until they parted ways, and the one after that and the one—). She read them and she laughed.

She did not mourn. She did not. She did not mourn?

Abigail hiked into the backcountry with her father's ghost, just her knapsack and her battered old sleeping bag and her hunting knife.

She had blood on her hands but some of it was her own. She had blood on her hands but she also had it rushing through her veins.

 _I will use all of me,_ she promised. _I am not a murder. I am a killing, a life, a death, a living. I will use all of me: these two stained hands, the ache in my feet and the ache in my belly, the breath in my lungs._

Abigail would use the swell of her lungs and sing dirges for Marissa, send her mother's grave flowers from a PO box in Arizona, make their favorite cakes on each of their birthdays and give it all away because she couldn’t bear to eat it.

She would cut off the parts of herself that her father had touched and she would burn them. The monster living in her belly was not hers. Abigail would burn it and it would keep her warm on cold nights.

Abigail would tie her hair back and push up her sleeves and plant her feet. She was here to stay, in this body and on this earth. She would fill this life with all of her.

She would use all of her. Every scrap. Every scar. Abigail got a tattoo over the remains of her ear, a feathery sunburst that spread up into her hair and dripped down to coil along her spine.

The tattoo artist brushed soft fingers over the scar tissue and said, "This will hurt, love. Scars are more sensitive than undamaged skin."

"Yes," said Abigail. "I know."

 

Abigail was named for her father's joy and that was just too bad, because she was busy finding her own.

She wasn't sure what her father had gone out to the woods to find, or to lose. Was he tired of being a man? Had he shed his skin out there and bared his monster to the watching eyes? Or had he been trying to protect them, to let the beast run and run until it curled up like a two year old and finally slept through the long nights?

Abigail went out into the woods to remind herself that there was nothing to find. She was already here. 

 

Abigail washed dishes in a little diner whose name she forgot as soon as she left, eighteen and running for her life, her heart beating and beating under her skin. She thought,  _I am selfish. I am_ , she thought, and dried her hands.

Somewhere outside Montreal, between one hitchhike and the next, Abigail walked down a grey street, her knapsack snug, her feet sore, and thought,  _Will Graham was not mine to save._ She thought,  _I did not drown him_.

Abigail sat in a truck passenger seat beside a talkative woman in her fifties, who had three grandchildren and wanted all her acquaintances to know their middle names, and Abigail thought,  _No one saved me._

_No one drowned me, but, god, they tried._

Abigail choked down apple pie at a truck stop in Alberta and thought about how much her mother had hated that linoleum.

Walking down a street somewhere near the Montana border, Abigail decided she wasn't a phoenix. She was not reborn from her ashes. She was living in them, her father's ghost at one shoulder, Hannibal's hand on the other. In the pit of her stomach she kept her sorrow at Alana's fractured calm, Will's drowning and the hand Abigail did not offer him, her mother's barometer spine. They burrowed deep in her, and she kept walking.

She filled her lungs. She would make use of every part of her. She would survive.

A truck came over a rise somewhere in the green expanses of the northwest. Trees and fog led down to rough waters, the Pacific stretching out endlessly before her waking eyes. Abigail was tucked in the passenger seat, staring out. The sun was coming up from behind the clouds. She was eighteen. She was breathing. 

 _I am not saveable,_ thought Abigail,  _but I am not lost._

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at ink-splotch.tumblr.com


End file.
